Some people have been stuck in their relationship with God for the past decade. What do I mean by that? Simply put, they haven’t progressed in the intimacy with the Father as they should have.
Maybe you’re at this point in your life where you're asking, “Why is my relationship with God mundane?” The once flourishing, exciting emotions you had about God have dwindled, and you hesitate to pick up the Bible. I’ve been there.
How does your relationship with God feel?
The best it could be!
It's pretty good
It could be better
Mundane and/or boring
God created us to grow and develop into becoming more like Christ. If we are never changed into His image, where there is abundant life, we will be left behind in the image of this world. You can call it what you want: changing, evolving, growing, maturing, transforming, but the root of it all is that we cannot stay the same as we were when we became saved. We must develop into all God has called us to grow into.
But it’s also important to know that,
we aren’t changing for God, but God is changing us for Him.
God isn’t forcing us to change. We aren’t changing so that God can love us more. This change doesn’t affect God whatsoever. You would know this if you had heard my teaching on The Power of Purity. Everything we do that transforms us into the image of Christ benefits us, not God.
The good news is that God is already pleased with you if you are in Christ. He loved you so much that while you were (past tense) a sinner, He sent Jesus to die for you (Romans 5:8). If He loved you so much in your sinful nature, how much more does He love you in your righteous nature?
But just because we know this information doesn’t give us the free pass to abuse this grace. This enables us to change with freedom of guilt. I’m sure you’ve made a New Year’s resolution at some point or another in your lifetime. Maybe you made the resolution to go to the gym every day for the year. After week one, you felt pretty good, but then week three came along, and you accidentally missed a day. For most people, the first emotion to enter their hearts is guilt.
They didn’t fulfill their promise to themselves, so they feel bad, and out of this feeling of guilt, they try to get back on their plan. Doing the right thing because you feel condemned to do it will only last for so long. Just look at the Israelites as an example.
When they left Egypt, they had fellowship with God day and night (Exodus 13:21). However, when Moses went up to the mountain to commune with God, the people essentially told Moses, “Tell God to give us whatever command He wants, and we will follow it.”
So God gave the first commandment: to have no other gods before Him. Moses spent forty days on the mountain with God, and before he came back down, the people had already started worshiping a false god! Those idiots!
Instead of having God relate to them based on His goodness, they wanted Him to relate to them based on their goodness. When we have that same mindset, it’s impossible to follow up with, just like the person making an unrealistic goal to go to the gym every day of the year. Once we fail, condemnation sets up from us or the enemy, and we try to do better not to feel so guilty.
The only way we can change is to acknowledge that guilt isn’t enough. We need to know that God loves us despite our mistakes and shortcomings.
So, how do we begin to change for good? Again, we aren’t changing for God, but He is changing us for Him. It won't be enough if we try to change ourselves in our own willpower. We need to let His power work in us, too, giving us lasting change to live a life pleasing to Him.
We also need to stop trying to convince God to follow our plans instead of His.
For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9).
We often like to have a plan established and ask God to bless it. We aren’t aware that we are essentially asking God to conform His plans to match ours. Jeremiah says that God knows the plans that He has for us. God already has plans for our lives; we need to follow them, not vice versa.
His ways are not our ways, meaning we need to stop trusting our ways and start elevating our way of thinking up to God’s level of thinking. God is a big God, and He does impossible things. If the plans that you have for your life are possible to accomplish through strategy and logic, I can guarantee you that your plan is miles short of God’s. Whatever you are dreaming of right now for your life, God is trying to tell you to dream bigger. Don’t limit what God can do by your small thinking.
Many places in the Bible tell us that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. God doesn’t change. If He did impossible things in the past, He is still doing impossible things today and will continue to do impossible things forever.
If God doesn’t change, that also means that He is a stable God. He doesn’t change His mind multiple times, leaving us to guess which mood He’s in on any given day. He is a consistent God; if He has a plan for your life, that plan will not change. Romans 11:29 says God’s gifts and callings on your life are irrevocable. He can’t take back what He gave you. If God has a great plan for you, He can’t take it back if you mess up. His plans are easy to follow because He doesn’t change.
However, this also means that if God doesn’t change, and our relationship with Him isn’t where it should be, then we are the ones that have to change. If you feel that your relationship with God is boring, stagnant, or mundane, it’s not God that’s the problem; it’s you.
The devil wants you to believe that God is the issue in your life. He will even use the Bible to convince you that God is the problem in your relationship. I’ve heard many people try to say that God is a mean God. They might not say it in those words exactly, but that’s the message they are preaching.
They’ll say things like God gives and takes away (Job 1:21), we are cursed with a curse if you don’t tithe (Malachi 3:9), and if you sin, God won’t bless you (Deuteronomy 28:15-68). They use all of these Old Testament verses to try and convince you that God is a mean God, that He’s out to get you, that He punishes you through hardship and sickness, that He strikes you with poverty to teach you a lesson, and it’s all wrong.
They’ll say all these things, standing on Malachi 3:6, which states that God doesn’t change, and if God doesn’t change, He still does these things today. What they miss is what the writer of Hebrews says.
[Jesus] being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person (Hebrews 1:3, brackets added).
Jesus was the express image of God. Other translations say Jesus was the “sole expression” and “perfect imprint and very image of God’s nature.”1 Jesus completed the image of God. This means that the image of God in the Old Testament was incomplete.
Whatever we saw Jesus do, God’s nature was on display. God is a loving, good God. He wants the very best for you, and if you’re not living in His best, it’s not God who needs to change towards you; it’s you who needs to change towards Him.
Live in the victory!
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